Data Integration Made Easy

ReportMiner 6.4 Webinar: New Features Revealed

Our latest webinar, ReportMiner 6.4 New Features Revealed, demonstrates new automatic features that make it the most intelligent, user-friendly software on the market today. The webinar covers the following useful new features that automate many time-consuming manual tasks, saving you time and increasing your data quality. You can view the webinar on demand here.

Key new features demonstrated in the webinar are:

Auto creation of data regions

Auto creation of fields

Rule-based filtering from export settings

Looping from export settings

Auto parsing of names and addresses

Using PDF forms in dataflows

We’re sharing the Q&A from the end of the webinar, which answers some of the most popular questions about this latest release.

Does the automatic pattern finder work with a multi-line data block? If yes, how do you specify the number of lines in the block?

When you are selecting a pattern, the line count is automatically set to one, but can be changed. For example, you can select an entire block and then click on the left side, ReportMiner will include that as your entire region.

I saw that address parser didn’t get zip code for one of the records. Is that caused by bad data? How do we handle such scenarios?

The reason the zip code was missing is because it is bad data. If there is no match Centerprise will show it as blank. That is how Centerprise deals with bad records in the default or standard mode. However, we have an add-on that comes with a USPS database and it can do the data correction for you. If you have bad data and you want to standardize it, you just run it through the add-on and it will fill in or do the correction for any bad data.

When you did the extraction from the customer address data, it populated the address country field with US; it didn’t look as though the country was included in the record. Where did the US come from?

The application goes through the data and if it finds a US address it automatically populates it. It does not, however, default to US for an address that is not in the US.

When will Version 6.4 be available?

The beta is available now. Contact sales@astera.com to get that download. The full release will be available April 15.

Will 6.4 be compatible with files created in 6.3?

Yes

How many sample lines can you specify for the auto region feature? Is there a limit on positive and negative sample lines?

The way automatic creation of regions works is that the user selects some sample lines in the application, both positive and negative, and indicates to for sure include the positive lines and for sure exclude the negative lines, no negative lines should not be a match and no positive lines should be a match. Typically when trying to create the regions a couple of positive lines and a couple of negative ones is good enough to build a reasonably good pattern. However, in some cases you may need to do more than that. There is no limit on how many positive and negative lines can be selected, but typically you aren’t going to need more than 4 or 5, at the most 10.

In the looping feature, can we keep adding records to the same output file?

Yes, you can add records to the same output file. When exporting a file, you can see that there is an option to Append to File. If you check that box, it will keep adding records to the existing file. You could theoretically loop through an entire folder and dump it into one file.

Can I write a filter rule for export that involves multiple fields?

Yes you can. As shown in the figure below, if you open the data export window and then the rule for Filtering Data option, and then expand the Data Export folder in Objects, you’ll see all the fields you have available to you that you have defined either automatically or manually by selecting a region and renaming these fields. Then in the Expression box at the bottom you can apply your filter. For example, during the webinar demo of this feature, the use wrote “Item=sofa.” You can involve all kinds of fields and have them as complicated as you need them to be. You’ll notice that in the categories section you have a lot of functions at your disposal, especially the name and address ones, that you can use to manipulate these expressions. So, for example, you can use operators such as adding numbers together, division, so as long as an expression evaluates to a single value, you can use that value to filter out certain records that don’t match that filter.